The most profound benefit of phasing out gas water heaters will be in reducing planet-warming emissions and slowing the climate crisis. It's not an exaggeration to say that this may be the most important action we can take today in the Bay Area to stop global warming.
Your gas water heater is basically a machine for turning gas into CO2 and heat. You can't see or smell the CO2, but the amount is massive - your water heater makes enough CO2 to double its concentration in a typical bedroom in just 8 minutes - and does so 24/7. Luckily, the CO2 is vented to the outside, or it would kill us, but instead, it is helping to destroy the planet.
Just how bad are water heaters? Well, heating water for an average family-of-four releases about 3,646 pounds of CO2 every year. But it's much worse than that. Because 2-3% of methane gas leaks, everywhere from drilling to your house piping, and because methane is 84 times as bad for climate as CO2, the real emissions are equivalent to 6,200 pounds per year.
What does 6,200 pounds mean? Well, it's the entire annual emissions of a small village of 22 people in Uganda, or 2/3 of someone from Sweden. It's the equivalent of driving your car 7,000 miles (404g/mile), almost 3 road trips from San Francisco to New York. It's also over a quarter of the emissions of the average Californian, so swapping out your water heater is a really big deal. You can save 42 tonnes of emissions over the heater's lifetime, or 4 years of your entire emissions, all in just one single act.
Reducing our own emissions is a moral imperative. Phasing out gas water heaters across the whole Bay Area starts to make a dent in the largest global problem we've ever faced.
With 7.5 million people, the gas water heaters of the Bay area emit a whopping 5 *million tonnes* of CO2 per year. That's over twice the weight of the entire population of California. Or, enough to double the CO2 concentration in a cloud that covers the 47 square miles of San Francisco to a staggering depth of over 13 miles (64 times taller than Salesforce tower, and over twice as high as Mount Everest).
Over three quarters of Bay Area residents are concerned about climate change, but our individual actions often seem impotent to stop the climate crisis. But by working together, we can phase out millions of polluting gas water heaters, and make a real difference. If the Bay Area leads with these new standards, it is likely that all of California and many other states will follow.
This is a huge opportunity to save our future, maybe the most important climate action we can take right now in the Bay Area. Please take a moment to contact your Air District Board members [link], and sign up for updates [link].